


One Thing For Certain

by kalasie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 12x01, Episode: s12e01 Coda, Episode: s12e01 Keep Calm and Carry On, M/M, Mary Winchester POV, S12E01, Smart!Mary, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2016-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-22 10:43:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8282987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalasie/pseuds/kalasie
Summary: Mary is tired, sad, scared, angry, and confused.  She doesn't know the world anymore, but there is one thing she knows for certain.Dean and his angel are in love.





	

Even as a child, Dean had been protective. Whenever Sam would cry, she and John would always have to race in to quiet him down, or otherwise Dean would come in and try to calm his baby brother himself. He even beat his parents several times, and after sleeping through the night she would wake up and find him asleep in Sam's crib. It had happened just the week before, in fact.  
  
So although Mary barely knew her son as a man, she knew enough to expect Dean's reaction when he didn't find Sam at the bunker, telling her to stay put as he looked. (As though she hadn't just put him on the ground in her nightgown.) Dean had always thought he could take care of his baby brother better than his own parents could. (And if she read between the lines of their childhood, she suspected that he had been right.)  
  
She was not about to stand and wait while her son was missing. She tread carefully, looking from the sigil on the wall that she didn't recognize, a warning sign in and of itself, to the filing cabinets and bookshelves scattered everywhere. She remembered stories about the Men of Letters from her childhood. If they were real, she wanted to learn everything she could about them. How had her boys ended up with an abandoned bunker anyways?  
  
When she heard the door open, her instincts kicked in. She heard her father's voice in her head. 'Don't let anything get the drop on you. The only unfair playing field is the one in which you do not hold the advantage.' She thumbed the safety, listened to the approaching footsteps, and held the image of the room in her mind.

'Too far away and you miss, too close and they can make it physical. You're a good fighter, girl, but you're small. Make sure you can win.'

She swung around and pointed her (adult son's) gun at the stranger's center of mass.

"Hands in the air, get on your knees." The man didn't flinch. Rather, he stepped towards her, seemingly ignoring the gun. Sirens went off in her head.

"Who are you, and where is Sam?" Don't be fooled, Mary, monsters lie.

"Hands. Now."

She saw Dean enter from the corner of her eye.

"Woah-woah-woah-woah. It's okay, it's okay, he's a friend." He forced her gun lower. "Alright."

Mary was confused. He wasn't protecting her- he was protecting the other man from _her_?

"Hey, Cas." Dean held out his arms, and the man eagerly embraced him.

"Dean," said the man apparently named Cas, and Mary definitely heard wonder in his voice.

"Hey, okay. Alright." Dean acted amused by the hug for half a moment, before relaxing into it with his whole body. Mary suddenly wondered the true nature of this reunion.

"Dean, you're alive?!" Cas exclaimed, almost angrily.

"Yeah," Dean responded, sounding half-amazed.

"What about the bomb, and the Darkness, what happened?" Her son's -friend?- seemed desperate for details.

"I'll tell you everything. Where is Sam?"

"He's not here." And that was it. Mary needed more information.

"Are you a hunter?" Her family never really teamed up with anyone but family, but her sons were Winchesters, not Campbells.

"No, I'm an angel." "He's an angel." They both responded with the last thing she expected to hear.

"Come again?" Mary always said to Dean that angels were watching over him, but she didn't mean it this literally.

"Angel, capital A. You know, wings, harp." Her son explained it like he expected to not be believed.

"No, I don't have a harp," said the warrior of God.

"This is Castiel." Dean said his name like prayer, like it meant something beyond what she could comprehend. He turned to the angel.

"Cas, this is Mary. Winchester." For the first time, the man in the trenchcoat took took a step back.

"Your mother." Castiel said it with a depth that spoke of knowledge of what it meant to Dean to get his mother back.

"Yeah," Dean said, sounding like he still barely believes it himself. He recovers. "So wait, where- where is Sam? He's not answering his phone, there's blood on the floor, what's going on?"

Mary would interrupt and mention the sigil on the wall, but it seems like they have forgotten her completely.

"I don't know. We came back here, there was a woman waiting for us, she blasted me away. I don't know who she was, I don't know what happened to Sam."

"I don't understand. What happened?" How was it possible to blast an angel away? Is that what the sigil did?

"The bunker's empty so they've obviously left here. You said woman? Not an angel, not a demon, a human?" Dean said, ignoring her question completely.

"She was human." Okay, so that was apparently a power that angels had.

"When did this go down?"

"It was 2:12 AM."

Then Dean pulled out a something she didn't recognize and opened it to reveal a keyboard and screen, but- was that possible?

"Is that a- a computer?"

"Yes," came from her left, and she turned to look at Castiel. "I don't trust them," he continued.  Well, at least she wasn't alone on that front.

Dean tapped the keyboard and video of intersections came up on the screen.

"Got something," he announced.

When he explained it, she didn't understand how, but they had a lead.

 

 

They stopped for coffee, and Mary's world tilted sideways. She watched as an entire family didn't exchange one word, instead looking at screens even smaller than the one Dean had pulled out earlier. She heard the effects of games you used to be only able to hear in arcades, coming out of something the size of a deck of cards. There was obvious affection between them, but they barely glanced at each other. She saw a woman tap her phone screen to a bigger screen to pay for her coffee.

 

She was brought out of her thoughts when Dean's angel friend set her coffee down in front of her.

"This must be very difficult for you." An understatement. "I remember my first moments on Earth. It's jarring." Jarring, she thought, terrifying, confusing, unbelievable, and a million other things, but yes, jarring.

"One word for it."

"I grew up with hunters. I've heard of people coming back from the dead before. But actually do it? After thirty years? A lot's changed. A lot."

Castiel didn't respond, barely had a chance to, when Dean approached.

"Find anything?" He questioned.

"Yeah, I ran the, uh, tail number that whats-his-face gave us." His name is Jamie Ross, Dean. Names are important. "The plane that evil Elsa flew in on has diplomatic registry."

Diplomats mean government. Wherever this woman is from, it's bigger than just her. But that didn't explain Castiel's dismayed expression. She was missing something.

"Which means?"

"Which means its flight plans are sealed, unless you want to hack the State Department." Mary didn't know exactly what that meant, but it didn't sound great.

"Who are these people?" Who would want to kidnap Sam? Who would have the knowledge and resources to defeat an angel in five seconds flat?

Once again, her train of thought was interrupted by Castiel.

"Dean." He directed her son's attention to a veterinary clinic across the street. Of course, blood means wound. They would have needed someone to stitch him up.

* * *

 

They waited until the vet had his back turned. After that it was easy to sit him down and find out what happened.

She and Dean questioned him together. The angel didn't say a word, barely moved, until he stalked up to the vet. Mary didn't know what he would have done if Dean hadn't held him back, but she wasn't averse to finding out.

The vet told them about the wound, who was there, and what time it happened, but he was still holding something back. It was time for her to find out what Castiel was capable of.

"Hurt him," she ordered.

 

But she didn't even get a chance to see. The vet was so terrified of the well-dressed silent man that as soon as the angel grabbed his shirt, he gave up the last piece of information he possessed- the phone number of the woman who stole her son. Her son had been in the hands of a demon not twelve hours before. She'd be damned before she let anything happen to him now.

* * *

The vet's inability to lie came around to hurt them. He didn't last ten seconds before the woman realized something was wrong. Dean grabbed the phone.

"Listen, bitch. I don't care who you are, I don't care what you want. You have my brother."

She could barely hear the voice on the other side of the line. "Dean Winchester. I heard you were dead."

"Well you heard wrong. Now I'm gonna give you one chance, just one, to hand Sam back."

"Sorry, not possible."

"Oh, you think you can run from me? Try it. Because when I find you, and I will find you, if he is not in one piece I will take you apart. Do you understand me?" She hung up, and Dean broke the phone in half. Mary understood the sentiment.

They tore out of the vet's house, hell bent.

* * *

They had no leads but a phone number, and Sam was still in the hands of an unknown enemy.

"Now what?"

"Well we've got her number, let's head back to the bunker and we'll put a trace on it."

And then everything went black.

* * *

When she came to, a woman in black was pointing a gun at her son, talking about how they didn't even give her a fight. She saw a long blade between her and the woman, and she saw red. For a moment she wasn't sure if one of the shots hit her son, but as soon as she saw that he was unharmed, the gravity of her actions hit her. She had killed a human woman.

She sat on the back seat of the Impala, looking at her hands. The red she saw when that woman was threatening her son now stained those hands. She had given up hunting for a reason, and now she was being dragged back in.

Dean and Castiel hid the car in the woods, hid the evidence of her crimes, while she sat.

Dean approached her, and for a moment she was struck by how beautiful he was. Her baby boy, only four years old, was thirty seven and the hunter she never wanted him to be.

 

"Found her cell phone in the car. Last call was made from an Aldritch, Missouri. We're guessing Sam's probably around there."

Sam's whereabouts. "Good. That's great."

But Dean didn't seem to believe her.

"Are you okay?" he asked. She remembered her promise to herself to protect her boys, no matter what, but that was impossible now. Now, she had to tell the truth.

"No. Nope. I'm sorry, I just, I spent my life running from this, from hunting. And I got out. I never wanted this for you and Sam." There it was. Her greatest fear, the nightmare that woke her up time and time again, was their life. From just the small part of their history Dean had told her, she could tell that their lives had been fraught with despair, pain, betrayal, and heartbreak. How could she watch them like this, when her actions had caused it? Did they ever get a break? Did they ever have time to be truly happy? Then Dean responded.

"Mom, I- I get it. I do. If I had kids I wouldn't want them in this. But Sam and me? Saving people, and hunting things, this is our life. And I think we make the world a better place. I know that we do."

* * *

As they drove through the night towards Missouri, she couldn't sleep. She watched her son in the front seat, sitting next to his angel. He kept looking back, making sure that she was still there.

He kept looking at Castiel as well.

His words echoed through her head. 'If I had kids.' 'Our life.' And most of all, 'Make this world a better place.'

She had seen a slice of her boys' life. She had seen where they lived, an actual bunker, not a house. She had seen the lack of personal touches in their home. She had seen what they were lacking.

But she also saw what he had. Castiel. Cas.

The affection between the two of them was evident. The protection, the trust, the way they interacted and played off each other. Mary had seen hunting partners before. They trusted each other in a fight, had each others' backs, and got along well enough, but she had never seen anything like this. This was more like her parents.

They may not see it, but the foundation for any such relationship is love. What type of love, she did not know. She didn't know a lot of things in this time. She didn't know the world anymore, didn't understand it. If she didn't have such an all-encompassing goal, she would have drowned by now.

But she knows one thing for certain. Dean and his angel? Are in love.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this up after a lot of emotions following the season premiere. If anyone wants to beta it, I would be very thankful.


End file.
